


worms

by thefudge



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Politics, Control Issues, Dom/sub, F/M, Older Man/Younger Woman, Power Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:47:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26830894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefudge/pseuds/thefudge
Summary: It’s terribly addictive for a susceptible girl like her - this bug under his shoe feeling.
Relationships: Chief-of-Staff/Senator's Daughter
Comments: 17
Kudos: 62





	worms

**Author's Note:**

> ....did I write this just because I want John Cho to play a silver fox Type A control freak in a decadent miniseries? Maybe so, maybe so.  
> I won't lie, this was also inspired by the whole debacle with Kellyanne Conway's daughter and her famous TikToks. Some aspects of this story are kiiiind of ridiculous, but listen, this semester has laid me out and it's barely October, i needed to INDULGE.

Vicky has practiced it in her head all week long. She’s going to call him by his first name, the way her mother does. She knows it will annoy him. But TV has taught her that men like to be annoyed from time to time.

“Hi, _Adrian_. Is that a new tie?”

Her heart beats so loud she’s surprised he can’t hear her. 

Her mother’s chief-of-staff only spares her a withering glance before he goes back to texting. “Shouldn’t you be at boarding school?”

“I’m too old for boarding school.”

“Huh. Could’ve fooled me,” he remarks, walking past her into her mother’s study.

Vicky’s shoulders slump. It was a pretty useless question, all things considered. The man seems to wear a new suit every day.

But he _could_ acknowledge her presence from time to time. It would be _nice_. She has long given up on her mother and father. But for some reason, she still wants Adrian Hwang’s approval. 

Probably because it’s near impossible to get.

The only time he ever smiled at her was when they had to film a TV spot when she was fifteen. She was supposed to make a scripted joke about her mother making mac and cheese while reading criminal case files.

Everyone chuckled. Adrian only smiled.

Her delivery, the director told her, lacked spark. Could she be a bit _bubblier_?

“Honestly, Victoria, this is the least you could do,” Adrian reminded her none too kindly.

But she still tripped over her tongue.

She was vulnerable to first names too.

And he was the only one who ever bothered with the extra syllables. 

Is it a crush?

Yes, in the sense that she always feels crushed by him.

It’s terribly addictive for a susceptible girl like her - this bug under his shoe feeling.

At the governor’s ball, she wears a green dress, because she heard that was his favorite color. It’s stupid. People tell her she looks just like her mother, and she knows not to take it as a compliment.

He spends all night talking to donors and industry titans, dances two dances with her mom and then two more with an older woman who is on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and, judging by the way he puts his arm on the small of her back she thinks they must’ve slept together a couple of times, at least. 

She idles in his vicinity at the wine bar, sipping on a stale Sprite. In her head, it all goes down like in a Lana del Rey song, but in reality, she doesn’t register at all. She’s barely a speck on the horizon. The thought of it gives her shivers. She’d like for his eyes to land on her, but she wouldn’t know what to do with it.

The only time he addresses her all evening is when he returns to their table in the ballroom. She’s eating the beef stroganoff and drops of it land on her chin.

“Use the napkins, Victoria. That’s what they’re for.” 

She sinks the fork’s prongs into her finger under the napkin.

She sits in the back of the town car with him on a day trip to DC. Her mother needs her for a photo op.

The car smells faintly of his cologne. Cedarwood. Her throat is parched. She’s sick with nerves. Can he see the effect he has on her?

No, of course not. He has decided to treat her like a child, so she’ll always be a child to him. Children don’t have these kinds of desires.

Adrian is engrossed in his iPad. She tries to peek at what he’s reading. It looks like the Financial Times.

“Find something useful to do, Victoria,” he mutters.

She crosses her legs. Are her armpits damp with sweat, she wonders?

She opens her rucksack. She takes out her book. She grabbed it from her dad’s private stash. _Pensees_ , by Blaise Pascal. In the original French. She flips through it until she reaches a middle point. She wants to give the impression that she has been reading it for a while. Her French is passable thanks to a small part of her childhood being spent with her paternal grandparents in Amiens, but she gets lost in the fog of philosophical thought. The words on the page barely make sense. They especially don’t make sense with him sitting there. But she wants him to think that maybe there’s more to her than her apparent mediocrity. 

A few moments later, she’s startled to hear Adrian chuckle. He’s looking at her book.

“He is judge of all things, yet an imbecile worm,” he rattles off. “He is the glory and the scum of the universe.”

“What?”

He stares at her for a moment like she’s too stupid to comprehend, and then shrugs, returning to his iPad.

Vicky agonizes in silence. It was a quote from the book. She should’ve recognized it. She should’ve said something clever in return. She should’ve said, _yes, humans are the great and brilliant scum of the world, we are in agreement._

She closes the book and stares out the window, hiding her shame.

Worms, indeed.

That night, she touches herself under the covers and brings herself to orgasm by picturing him telling her she’s too stupid to read Pascal. It’s not healthy for her self-esteem, she knows. Her childhood shrink would be appalled. But his disdain is better than nothing.

The aftermath leaves her a little breathless. She takes out her phone and looks in the reverse camera. She’s flushed, pupils dilated, lips parted. A total fucking idiot.

She takes a picture. Takes ten more. Twenty. Goes through them until she settles on one she likes.

Emboldened and anxious, she sends him the picture.

She waits a few seconds and then she quickly writes, _Sorry! Was supposed to send to Mom. My bad!_

She drops the phone on the bed and stares at the ceiling, frozen in fear.

He sends her a reply two hours later.

_There’s no need to send that to your mother._

She mulls over his text for an entire week. She turns it inside out. It feels loaded and knowing. Maybe even playful.

No, playful doesn’t describe Adrian at all. If he’s toying with her, it’s only to make her understand the error of her ways.

Or maybe it’s a neutral text from someone who doesn’t give a fuck what she does in her own time.

She wonders if he deleted the photo.

She drops out of college in the middle of sophomore year.

Her parents are mildly disappointed, but they expected her to bungle it. It’s not that she’s not smart; she just won’t apply herself. She’s that sort of problem child who doesn’t actually make that many problems - one of those unsuccessful house plants that do not flower, but you keep it around because you feel bad about throwing it away.

No, Mom and Dad are putting all their eggs in her toddler brother’s basket. Eric is “unusually bright for his age”. That’ll do.

Vicky doesn’t come home straight away. She crashes at her friend’s beach house. The very wealthy have a distinct way of coping with failure, she has to admit.

What brings her to heel is a glacial email from Adrian which she reads, feverishly, at 3 AM in the morning.

The first line of the email already calls her _feckless_. She knows what the word means, but she still looks it up. Then he goes on to remind her that next year is a re-election year, and does she have _any_ idea the kind of blow their public image will take? He advises her to “change the narrative”. She will simply switch majors. In fact, he has a few options in mind. He expects her to take fucking note. The “fucking” is implied.

Vicky writes back at 3 AM, high on hormones.

_I understand. I want to do better. Tell me what you want me to do._

And the cold snake writes,

_I already told you._

So, she switches from PolSci to Art History. It was on Adrian’s list. Art History is inoffensive and ornamental. It looks good for candidates’ children to be knowledgeable in something completely spineless.

But Art History is not so tame.

She studies Turner’s angry ships at sea. She learns a lot about the avant-garde and Diego Rivera’s political art. She watches Marina Abramovic documentaries and reads John Berger in her spare time. Soon enough, she’s having _those_ kinds of late-night chats with a few people in her building, talks about the dim façade of neoliberal capitalism and the state of the art in a world where Banksy is the morally bankrupt adjudicator.

And then her mother comes up. Out of the blue.

All of them have something to say.

“You know her platform is absolute garbage, right? Like no offense, but she’s the most conservative Democrat on the ticket.”

“Oh yeah, and her time as a DA? Total shit show. Whatever she wants people to think now, she locked up so many black kids on trumped up charges.”

“Not to mention, the legislation she helped pass killed a lot of food-stamp programs.” 

Vicky blushes and stammers a few weak replies. Had they prepared this rebuttal in advance?

Yes, she’s aware that her mother’s rise from DA to senator has always been riddled with problems, but she never looked into it too much. In fact, she was expressly discouraged from doing so. It was always taken for granted that she had no head for politics.

But now she feels sick to her stomach.

“What are you gonna do about it, huh?” her new friends ask her.

Vicky shakes her head, helpless. “My mother won’t listen to me.”

“She doesn’t have to listen now,” one of the girls chimes in. “But make some noise online and she will. You’ve got that power.” 

Vicky has never had power. She is good at doing what she’s told, especially when it’s the right thing to do. Her quest for approval can now be morally validated.

Soon after, she and her friends take to Twitter and TikTok and Instagram.

The videos blow up.

A few days later, her face is plastered all over Fox News, and every media outlet is talking about Senator Ardens’ daughter and her budding political activism.

Adrian is _not_ happy.

Okay, maybe she knew he would not be.

Maybe that was part of it, too.

She stands in the townhouse foyer with a scarf wrapped around her throat like a noose. Her suitcases have been taken upstairs.

Adrian is fuming.

“I will be in charge of your phone use from now on. Every tweet or post or other inane bit of information you wish to share with the world will go through me. Better yet, perhaps you will keep silent for a while. You can’t possibly have more to say.”

Vicky frowns. “But that’s not –”

“I don’t care how unjust you think that is. I will not have you damage this campaign further.”

His eyes cut her to pieces.

She looks away. “I was going to say that’s not a good look.”

“What?”

“People will be able to tell someone is controlling my account. They’ll think you’re all silencing me.”

“Oh, _now_ you care about the optics?”

This is the most she’s ever talked to him, she thinks. She wants to keep it going.

“It would also look better if Mom made her platform a little more progressive, don’t you think?”

Adrian laughs a cold laugh. “So. You spend two months with the Vaping Society and you think you can talk about platforms.”

She steels herself, even though her insides feel like water. “I think the electorate deserves better.”

Adrian’s eyes thin to slits. He opens his mouth, closes it.

She can’t help but note the few silver locks in his hair. They make her stomach do funny things.

He takes a step closer and speaks quietly, only for her ears.

“I’m quite disappointed, Victoria. I thought you had more sense than that.”

 _You did?_ she thinks.

But she has an ace of cards prepared. She thought about it all the way back here. Trepidation builds in her chest.

“You’re the one who made me switch majors, so this is your fault. I just did what you told me.”

She said it. She actually said it. She can’t believe it.

Adrian blinks. A small nerve pulses under his left eye.

His jaw clicks definitively.

“Is that so?”

She nods, apprehensive, yet curious. Elated to still be the focus of his attention.

And then his hand slips into the pocket of her coat.

Vicky freezes.

He’s so close she can smell the light, clean sweat of a day’s worth of work on him. Sharing warmth with him is like being boiled alive. His hand searches for something in the vicinity of her thighs.

Her throat is completely dry.

He fishes out her phone and holds it up for her to see. Then he pockets it.

“You want to know what you are, Victoria?”

Her eyes widen. This has already gone off-script. God, she’s dying to know.

“You are a copy,” he rasps. “You are not interesting. You are not original. You are just a copy of a copy of a copy. That’s what children _are_ , essentially. And as you go to bed tonight, I only want you to think about that. How much of a replica you really are.”

They stand there for a few moments, her unable to speak, him looking down at her with a kind of paternal contempt that makes her toes curl in her shoes.

And then he sweeps past her, dismissing her, as always.

She thinks about what he said.

She thinks about it all night long. Just like he said.

The official story is she’s taking a break this semester to work on her mother’s campaign. They’ve got her drafting emails and writing gift card dedications. She can’t really fuck it up too badly. But one time, she does offer to pick up fliers from a print shop and a few people recognize her on the street. The videos are still going strong, even now.

They want to take selfies with her.

Vicky smiles. She’s happy to.

She hugs the strangers, puts her arm on their backs.

They think she was so brave and cool to speak out in public. Does she want to say anything now?

She shakes her head. No, she’s a total fake. She lets them speak instead.

She basks in their approval.

Adrian makes her sit at headquarters well after midnight.

He makes her type until her fingers lose all feeling. She wants to do her part? This is one way to do it. Posing in pictures with the “radical left” is the other way, which is the _wrong_ way.

It’s all right, though. He’s got all night.

He works silently across from her, monitoring her, making sure she doesn’t slack.

He has rolled the sleeves of his shirt and she can see his bare arms, his bare wrists too. 

He doesn’t wear a watch. Most Type A guys like him do. He certainly has the budget to indulge.

“Why don’t you wear a watch?” she blurts out without thinking.

Adrian doesn’t look up. “I have better things to do than look at the time.”

She almost snorts. What a weirdo. Even Father Time can’t please Adrian Hwang.

And she must have said that out loud too because he’s stopped typing.

“You’re tired,” he deduces.

“Yeah, sorry,” she nods, apologetic.

He gets up from the chair and walks to her desk.

Vicky opens her mouth. “Can I go home –?”

“Hold out your hands for me.”

“What?”

“Your hands. I’ve got just the thing.”

Vicky lifts them up gingerly.

_Whack!_

The ruler comes down hard. It burns a red line across her palms. The sting comes right after. She drops her hands on the desk like dead fish. She curls her fists. _Fuck_ , that hurt. She’s only seen shit like this from mean adults in Roald Dahl stories.

Tears almost wet her eyelashes.

Adrian looks down at her, drinking in her reactions.

She shifts in her chair.

“Ouch.”

She’s such a fucking coward she won’t even give voice to her pain.

And then Adrian says something she never expected. “This came in handy when I pulled all-nighters in college.”

She looks up at him. “You…hit yourself to stay awake?”

“The nerves in the palms are particularly sensitive. The pain makes you alert for the next half hour,” he explains matter-of-factly.

Vicky licks her lips. Okay. Yeah. Nerves.

She lifts her palms again. “I’m still kind of sleepy. Maybe I need another hit.”

She’s never been good at reading him, but she thinks she sees something like morbid curiosity in his eyes.

“Maybe you do,” he rasps.

The sound of plastic against skin is like a small bomb going off. She bites her lip hard and knocks her knees together.

The tingling in her palms travels all the way down.

Adrian taps her desk with the ruler.

“Back to work,” he says. But he doesn’t immediately walk away from her desk.

The fucker wants to see the pain bloom.

She fingers herself in the bathroom, head leaning against the stall.

Vicky pictures him catching her in the act, ruler in hand. Her fingers speed up, but they’re still cramped from typing.

She comes slowly, with a delay, as if waiting for him.

When she walks back to her desk, he doesn’t look up.

She sits down.

“I hope you washed your hands,” he says absently, looking down at his phone.

Vicky swallows. “I always do.”

And okay, maybe she’s just too fucking zoned out, but she swears there’s the shadow of a smirk at the corner of his mouth.

Adrian joins the family for Sunday brunch. Her mother talks about how essential he’s been to her all these years, how she could’ve never gotten so far without him, and then she presents him with a gift in a silver paper bag. Adrian smiles a superior smile. He peers inside the bag. He takes out the shiny Breguet box. It’s a Heritage watch, 18-carat rose gold.

“It was Vicky’s idea, actually,” her mother says.

Adrian stares at her across the table. His eyes bury her in that chair.

“Thank you, Victoria.”

This time, she leans across her desk, one knee on the seat, ass sticking out from the pencil skirt. In her defense, she was working on some banners and was already standing. 

But her defense never works out. 

She splays out her hands. 

Just him picking up the ruler from his desk makes her wet. 

It's that fucking quick. 

She's quietly planning her next fuck-up, when her mother gets there first. 

Vicky was never shielded as a child from her parents’ extra-marital affairs. They were there, in the background, like boogey men that, after a while, turned out to be empty closets. Sometimes, they were called “adult matters”, other times “inevitable”. In order for Mommy and Daddy to stay together, they had to take care of their needs. True partnership means open-mindedness. Vicky has never debated that.

But now TMZ has obtained pictures of her mother in a car, cozying up with some rando after a meeting in DC. It doesn’t look good. Nothing about this looks good.

Adrian made her promise she wouldn’t pull shit like this during a fucking senate race of all things.

“I thought she’d nipped this in the bud years ago,” he mutters, voice quiet with fury. He paces the living room while Vicky stares at the photos, entranced.

Her mother looks so vulnerable at this blurry distance.

“She thinks she’s got the re-election in the bag, but she’s skating on thin fucking ice,” he adds bitterly, “and dragging all of us under with her.” 

Vicky watches him. The line of his shoulders is dangerously sharp. He’s been carrying this campaign on those shoulders all this time.

She thinks about her friends at Oberlin and how they’d probably cheer for this turn of events. She should too.

She licks her lips. “They got this footage tonight, right?”

“They’re going to run it in an hour. I only got it early out of courtesy,” he says remotely.

“The image is pretty blurry,” she argues.

“It’s her. People will know.”

“I guess. But…if she were to come out tonight and walk past some cameras, it would be harder to prove. I mean, she can’t be in two places at once, can she?”

Adrian stops pacing. He looks at her.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

And it’s the free profanity that really makes her want to do it.

“Wait here. I’ve got an idea.”

They used to say she’s got her mother’s small figure and her father’s nose. But it’s not such a singular nose.

No, most people say, _you look just like Kathleen_. They don’t add, _if she was unattractive_. But it’s probably what they’re thinking.

Still, the resemblance can be heightened with the right appendages. Her hair is longer, but she can pin it up. She can wear her mother’s favorite pumps and lipstick. There’s a lot she can do. All she knows is that, she’s going to make him happy, no matter what.

When she walks out, she’s wearing her mother’s skin, right down to the nylons.

The last touch is the sunglasses.

She props them on top of her head.

Adrian watches her come down the stairs. His eyes size her up, like she’s completely new.

She really wants to stay in that gaze forever.

It’s not approval but it’s really fucking close.

She knows he's not attracted to her mother. And so, whatever he feels right now is just about her. Odd how that works. Only when she inhabits someone else can she feel special to him. 

“What do you think?” she asks, breathless.

He chews on his bottom lip. “It won’t work.”

But he doesn’t believe that. He wants it to work. And sometimes, that’s all it takes.

She stops by his side, straightens her back. She drops an octave, trying to sound like her. “You know she kind of treats you like shit.”

Adrian smiles coldly. He takes it in stride. “And?”

She shrugs. “You’re not wearing the watch she gave you.”

“My father always wore a watch. I did not like him very much.”

It’s probably the most personal thing he will ever share with her. She can’t dwell on it. Vicky knows she has to play her part. She shrugs again and pulls down her mother’s sunglasses.

“He’s not here to see you, is he?”

It’s funny. She gets the confidence not because she’s as assertive and cocksure as her mother, but because she wants to please an older man who likes to strike her with his ruler.

It’s really funny that way.

The camera flashes look like little dying stars behind her sunglasses. It’s not so bad when you’re the center of the universe.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you. I _wish_ I had time for an affair,” she jokes to the reporters, husky, low, almost drunk on herself. She waves them off, tells them she doesn’t have a moment to _spare_.

She signals for Adrian to follow, fingers curled behind her.

His hand moves to the small of her back, and then he slips his fingers through hers. He squeezes.

He guides her back to the car.

It feels really fucking nice. 

It might still blow up in their faces, but they say nothing in the car.

Neither wants to jinx it.

He gives the driver a different address.

She thinks it’s a polling station, but it turns out to be his apartment.

She has always been curious how he lives, where he sleeps.

He opens the door and lets her pass.

Vicky takes off the sunglasses.

The interior is lavishly bare, but there are patches of warmth here and there. A fluffy red rug in front of the miniature fire place is definitely something she did not expect. She kicks off her heels and sinks her toes in it. It feels heavenly.

“Don’t get too comfortable. We’re leaving soon. I only need to pick up a set of clean clothes.” 

Vicky turns towards him. She doesn’t want the spell to end.

“I was good, wasn’t I?”

Adrian shrugs. The mask always stays on. “It was adequate. Least you could do after your little viral stunt. Let’s hope it sticks.”

_No._

He can’t take it back.

She won’t let him.

She has been so fucking good, all this time. And she’s tired. She’s earned some recognition. So, she looks straight at him and says,

“You know what, Adrian? You can suck my dick.”

Her body tingles with adrenaline. She’s more nervous now than when she walked out as her mother.

The lines of his face seem to sharpen. There’s that nervous tic under his left eye.

He rolls his sleeves.

“You’ll have to ask nicer than that.”

Vicky opens her mouth.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

She wonders if she’s slipped into another dimension, if this is really happening.

Adrian saunters towards her. She takes a step back and bumps into the dining table.

Ask nicer.

Her hands scramble for purchase.

“… _please_ suck my dick?”

She plays it off as a joke, laughs nervously.

Adrian stops before her. “I suppose that will do.”

His hands are dry as he lifts her knees.

The room is suddenly horizontal. She teeters so easily. She’s splayed like buffet. The table feels like a lit match under her spine.

Adrian makes smooth the wrinkles in her mother’s dress with his thumb, and then folds the hem an inch higher, and another inch, methodically. He picks out the seam in the nylons and very carefully, very slowly, rips it apart. There is nothing violent about it. The torn threads tickle her bare thighs.

“Now, Victoria,” he says her name like he’s just given it to her. “I’m going to ask you not to make too much of a mess. Are you able to do that for me?”

Her breath comes in quick. “Y-yes.”

“That does not sound very convincing,” he says, as his thumb brushes over the thin fabric of her underwear. Green. His lips twitch. 

Her thighs stutter. “Yes, I promise. I won’t –” his thumb parts her underwear and flicks her clit, “-m-make a mess.” 

“We’ll see,” he says, still unconvinced by her self-control.

And it doesn’t get any better when he kneels down between her legs.

She can see the dark shock of his hair, the melting ice in his eyes. And for some unearthly reason she remembers Blaise Pascal and worms. Copies of copies. 

“He is the glory and the scum of the universe,” she recites, staring up at the ceiling.

She feels his hot breath on her cunt. And a smile to go with it.

He finally gives her that last little piece of validation.

“Good girl.”

She does make a big fucking mess on his dining table.

But, all things considered, she doesn’t feel too bad about it.

**Author's Note:**

> ;)


End file.
